


Strange Police

by theravenwrites



Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: Academia, Depression, M/M, Mental Instability, Original Character(s), Post-Canon, implied past Henry/Julian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-22 02:02:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17050967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theravenwrites/pseuds/theravenwrites
Summary: When eras die, their legaciesAre left to strange police.Professors in New England guardThe glory that was Greece.--Clarence Day





	Strange Police

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nomette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nomette/gifts).



My office was on the top floor of the old English building on the far side of campus, a decrepit structure dating from the seventies. The department secretary was apologetic--promised I would be moved next semester--and I was given my own classroom down the hall as compensation. I made a show of accepting this disappointing state of affairs graciously, but in reality I couldn’t have been more pleased. Aside from a few silent grad students I had the place to myself. 

After years of drudging away as an adjunct throughout the greater Los Angeles metro area I had become the newest member of the English department at a small liberal arts college named after a certain Roman goddess. My predecessor had died of a heart attack a month before the beginning of the fall semester and all that was asked of me was to take over his modest slate of classes: Introduction to the Jacobean Playwrights; Greek and Roman Myth in Shakespeare; Deconstructing the Pastoral.

I was conscious, of course, of the echoes of Julian’s taste as I prepared my rooms. Even all these years later, putting together my own academic lodgings for the first time, how could I not be? I stayed away from all objets d’art or personal touches that were essential elements of his meticulous hosting but every room, consciously prepared or not, is an embodiment of its owner’s public presentation.

I scoured the building for the best furniture--sturdy and plain wooden pieces, mostly--and decorated my rooms with the aim of impressing my visitors with a bright, clean space. The classroom was a little cramped, and made smaller by an odd ledge that ran along the whole back wall at chest height, so I propped an oversized mirror in a tarnished gilt frame on it. In my office I hung a series of moody black and white photographs of empty cities at night I’d picked up at a yard sale the week before. They were well done but clearly amateur, and I let people assume I was their author.

For all my intense preparations it would be inaccurate to call myself excited or even happy about my situation. Yes, it was a nice change (the life of an adjunct is a difficult and unprofitable one) but for several years now I’ve experienced almost total anhedonia. It’s really not that bad once you get used to it. With my first paycheck I updated my closet of threadbare old suits once donated by Francis into a few sturdy ones in dark colors that would wear well. I was able to replace the lenses in an antique pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses I’d found at a flea market a few months before. All in all I felt a kind of quiet satisfaction with recent events and even slept well the night before classes began.

That calm stayed with me through the first several weeks, even in situations that would ordinarily have left me tense and miserable. My department head, a horrible woman named Liz Schultz, came to observe my Myth in Shakespeare class unexpectedly the fourth week, and caught flat footed I couldn’t think of an excuse to get rid of her.

“Richard, honey,” she said, leaning in to mime a kiss against my cheek, the smell of her floral perfume so strong I nearly gagged, “you won’t even notice I’m here. I just like to check in early in the semester, in case there are any little problems we need to take care of.”

I muttered some reply and gestured her towards a seat at the far end of the table as my small class began to file in, looking at her curiously.

“Don’t mind me,” she called out, smiling broadly. “Mr. Sullivan, it’s good to see you. I hope that tournament last weekend left you enough time to get started on your paper for me.”

“Totally,” said Josh, as he sat as far from her as possible in the small room. “It’s gonna be a breeze, Professor Schultz.”

He was some sort of athlete, I never found out what kind, but it might have been water polo--something, at any rate, that caused him to smell faintly of chlorine and put a green tinge in his shaggy blonde hair.

Brittany Ruiz and Luis Delgado followed him, walking close together and wearing matching expressions of disinterest. At first I had mistaken them for siblings--they were of a height and both had pin-straight black hair--but they were apparently high school sweethearts. Luis had his hand tucked into one of Brittany’s back pockets, a habit that she never acknowledged one way or the other.

Just as I was about to close the door Oliver Cho came running down the hallway, messenger bag thumping against his side and trendily cut and bleached hair flopping all over his face.

“Sorry professor,” he panted, flicking his hair back into place, as I stood aside to let him in.

“Not a problem, Oliver,” I said, perhaps a bit more jovially than I would have normally. 

Liz Schultz was making me a little nervous. From the corner of my eye I was keeping track of her in the mirror and I winced when I saw that she was settling next to Henry. He visibly stiffened at her approach and moved aside before any part of her (particularly vile) salmon pantsuit could touch him. I could hardly blame him, but I knew I would be hearing about it later, as if I had any control over what she did. That was the thing about Henry, I’d discovered over the last ten years: he refused to believe I couldn’t exert more control over my situation, if only I applied myself.

“Did everyone read A Midsummer Night’s Dream?” I asked. No one met my eye but there were a few half-hearted nods. This class was supposed to be something called a Socratic dialogue, a trendy term Henry and I enjoyed mocking viciously, but it was going to be difficult to have a dialogue by myself.

I knew I couldn’t expect the kind of devotion and rapt attention we had once given Julian, of course not, but it still annoyed me that they all so clearly wanted to be somewhere else. Luis and Josh hadn’t even bothered to get out their notebooks and Brittany was clearly looking at a small pink phone in her lap. I wanted to grab them all by the shoulders and shake them. 

Don’t you know what I gave up to get here? I wanted to ask. If you don’t like this frankly very easy class you should go do something else!

“And who’d like to start us off with a myth they noticed?”

“Well, like, the big one I saw was that the Queen of Athens is an Amazon?” said Luis. “They were these female warriors the Greeks made up.”

I nodded encouragingly. It’s embarrassing how quickly one finds oneself engaging in these kinds of asinine behaviors and phrases just to keep the discussion moving. “Very good. The King, Theseus, is also an important character in Greek myth. So right away we know the whole story is taking place within this mythical framework, giving it a heightened atmosphere where we don’t know what’s true and what’s not. Anyone else?”

“I don’t think he’s greek or roman, but isn’t Puck a myth?” asked Oliver.

“Right,” I said. “Puck is from the English tradition, the Green Man, so Shakespeare is drawing from multiple sources. But he still has an important role to play in the way that the other myths are presented to us, which we’ll get into later. There’s another big one that I want to talk about before we get to that, though. Anyone know what I’m thinking of?”

Josh looked up, his mouth hanging half-open. I used to assume he was a pothead because he always looked so doped up, but apparently the student athletes were all routinely given drug tests. Regardless of his relaxed to the max attitude he often gave the most coherent contribution out of the group.

“When Bottom gets turned into a donkey, that’s from Apuleius’s The Golden Ass.”

“Excellent, thank you Josh. Why do you think Shakespeare chose to use that particular myth?”

“Well, it’s all like a sex thing, right? Titania wants to have sleep with him and there are all those jokes about him being an ass and having big ears and whatever.”

“His name is already Bottom,” Luis said, laughing.

“Shakespeare loves a good innuendo,” I said, “and the Rude Mechanicals are the perfect way for him to include them without disrupting the serious plot of the four lovers. He always includes both, allowing his plays to venture into the transgressive but have order restored at the end. And these myths are about a lot of taboo topics, aren’t they? They let Shakespeare show off his education, sure, but they’re talking about really basic subjects like sex and death. Thoughts on why that might be important?”

Brittany looked up from her lap. “Everyone is like obsessed with them? But it’s impolite to talk about them most of the time? So it becomes like this controlled way of talking about these totally crazy ideas. It’s, like, group therapy.”

“Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?” asked Oliver. “If it’s supposed to be chaotic, shouldn’t it happen in an uncontrolled environment?”

I tried to smile indulgently at him, but I’m afraid it was more of a grimace. “There needs to be balance. Giving in to our baser urges any time we wanted would quickly devolve--”

A loud bang interrupted me and I reeled back in my chair. Henry’s eye fixed on me in the mirror and he too looked surprised, then concerned. Everyone else was standing and exclaiming, and a second or two behind them I realized the noise hadn’t been the report of a rifle but instead the impact of a bird running into the window.

“Look,” said Oliver, standing by the window and pointing down, “it’s dead. I guess it really is one for sorrow.”

“I think that’s magpies,” said Josh, who was tall enough to look over Oliver’s head without trouble. “What’s a bunch of crows called again? It’s something funny, I swear.”

I stood as well and attempted to shoo them back to their seats, conscious all the while of Liz sitting in the background, notepad out. She alone seemed unfazed and for a moment I had the absurd thought she had arranged for this to happen as a test. My left temple began to pound.

Two stories down a crow lay sprawled in the well-manicured lawn, black wings outspread in a parody of epicurean display. I felt watched and looked up to see its friends roosting in the branches of a nearby magnolia. A few of them swooped down to inspect the body.

“Look, they’re mourning it,” Brittany said. “It’s so sad!”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that crows were scavengers. “Come on, let’s not get distracted. We have a lot of ground to cover.”

But my headache only grew worse and I forgot all about Pyramus and Thisbe until Josh mentioned them. In the end I let them go five minutes early and barely made it through a short conversation with Liz before I had to go throw up. I don’t remember much of what she said, but the gist of it was that she thought things had gone well. I still don’t know how I pulled that one off but thank god I did. She may have been a bore (and a boor) but I needed her to like me if I wanted to keep this job.

I took a pill and lay on the floor of my office for several hours until I felt well enough to drive home. I lived downtown, over an hour with LA traffic, and I felt Henry’s solicitous presence in the backseat the whole time. Once he’d told me he thought my headaches were his fault but when I sarcastically offered to stop seeing him he said it wasn’t possible. I’m not sure I really wanted him gone, anyway. He was very comforting, most of the time.

At home in my mission-style apartment I poured myself a glass of bourbon and tipped some out on the kitchen floor. Not quite choai but I suppose I was feeling a little sorry for myself. Once I’d realized there’d be no leaving Los Angeles for me I cultivated an aesthetic dedicated to the oldest and grandest eras of the city, when Franciscan monks evangelized to the Chumash. It’s not my ideal setting but it does provide a nice respite from the dirty neon atmosphere of the city at large.

I fell asleep on the couch and dreamed, as I knew I would, of Henry. I always do, when I catch sight of him during the day.

Recently I read an article that mentioned--as a sidebar--that some people dream in color, some in black and white, and some don’t register color one way or the other. I don’t think I ever noticed either way before Henry died, but now he always appears to me in shades of gray. It suits him, I think. His dark hair and pale skin, his severe suits, they make him look out of time, which I suppose he is. The powder burn and hole at his temple look like the barest of shadows. He hasn’t aged, but he never looked much like a twenty-two year old anyway. What’s funny is how we didn’t think of ourselves as young when we were at school and now I’m surrounded by children every day. But then everything is deadly serious when you’re deciding what your life is going to be. I really can’t blame us for feeling that way.

Sometimes when I meet Henry we walk through certain half-deserted streets, talking of this and that. Usually I let him lecture on his topic of choice and in all these years he’s never repeated himself. Once in a while it occurs to me to wonder if he knew that much when he died or if he’s accessed new information since then but I always forget to ask.

Other times we were in Henry’s spartan bedroom in his house on Water Street. There were only two things different from how it had appeared in life: the picture of Julian and Vivien Leigh was gone from the closet door, and the large windows were covered with curtains like winding sheets. Lying flat on my back in the large bed I would get lost staring at the white, white walls as they glowed in the light of the kerosene lamps. Henry liked to hold me by the wrists and lean down against me, pressing his face into the crook of my neck. I liked it too. I hardly expected any of it and I couldn’t tell you how it all began but his weight felt real, probably the realest thing in my life at that point. And somewhat to my surprise he was a good kisser--slow, methodical. The funny part was that we hardly ever made it all the way undressed. Half the time Henry or I would start out in a full three-piece suit, although mercifully our shoes at least seemed to take care of themselves. But there was something I enjoyed about sliding my hands up under his pressed shirts, or lying there with my own shirttails and flies askew, more than mere nudity. It was the blurring of the lines that appealed to me, neither one thing or the other.

“Now that I’m a professor,” I said, squirming around until I could hook one leg around Henry’s, “does that make you eromenos again?”

He paused irritably from kissing and biting the side of my neck. “It seems clear to me who is erastes and who is eromenos.” He gave a little roll of his hips as punctuation and I laughed.

“I wouldn’t have taken you for such a literal thinker,” I said, a little breathily.

He pulled back, frowning. “I was referring to the fact that you still come to me for advice.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. I pushed myself up on my elbows. “When have I asked you for advice? No offense, but you killed yourself after you got me shot.”

“It’s implied,” he said coldly. “I’m biaiothanatos if you’ll recall, and you might wish to reconsider how isolated you are. You’ve become quite the Roman, you know, obsessed with order.”

“Well it’s kind of late for that, don’t you think?” I was more than a little annoyed with him, a not infrequent consequence of our meetings, but Henry would never back down. “Come on, forget it, I’m sorry I brought him up.”

I reached to pull him back down but it was too late. I could hear my neighbor’s yappy little dog barking and I woke up on the couch with a sore back and a mouth that tasted like something had died in it.

I knew Henry had a point, about my being too isolated. The trouble is that when you’re in college and looking for something to base the rest of your life on, you’re incapable of conceiving of the rest of your life, all those years doing the same thing. You can’t possibly understand how they stretch out in front of you, grey and endless. And even ten years later I knew I could hardly imagine living for forty, maybe even fifty, more years. And I didn’t think Henry really understood that either, although maybe he would disagree with me. The Greek concept of Hades was a pretty grim place, and there you were denied even the release of death.

My irritation aside, I did attempt to take his advice in my own way. Even if I doubted I was capable of truly feeling joy in my circumstances, I could at least derive an aesthetic pleasure from curating my mise en place to my own specifications. Satisfaction in precision, I’ve found, can often take the place of happiness the way a mechanical heart can take the place of a real one. I enjoyed my scholarship as much as anything, and I began work in earnest on a paper about the Jacobean relationship to religion. I met Sophie for dinner and I spoke to Francis on the phone. I showed up to office hours and I tried to call Camilla but got no answer. Henry I didn’t see--he was avoiding me, I assumed, still annoyed.

After a few weeks I was exhausted. I wasn’t sleeping well--the old nightmares were plaguing me again--and the paper had stalled when it turned out I’d written down a a quote wrong, then based an entire section on the incorrect phrase. Like all scholars, except probably Julian or Henry, blessed as they were with perfect ascetic sensibilities, I resorted to time honored practices in the face of major writer’s block: making up little games with my office supplies and bargaining with myself about when I could leave. When this paragraph is finished, once I’ve looked up that reference, if the sun falls on my desk in a certain way. 

I’d completely forgotten I was obligated to be there for another half hour and when Brittany knocked I flung open the door, wide eyed and hair askew.

“Yes?” I demanded.

She took a step back. “Um, I had a question about my essay? Do you have a second?”

I ran a hand through my hair and tried out a smile. “Of course, excuse me. You startled me, that’s all. Come in and sit down.”

I moved aside a stack of journals so she could take the visitor’s chair where she sat gingerly. She pulled a thin sheaf of paper out of her purse and balanced it on her knees.

“No other half today?”

“Um, no, Luis has band practice.”

“Band practice?” I raised an eyebrow. Occasionally, when I’m taken by surprise, I fall into an imiation of Julian to try and regain the conversational upper hand. I’m no impressionist but even just a few of his mannerisms are remarkably effective on students, I’ve found. “I suppose I should have guessed that at least one of my students would be in a band.”

“Yeah.”

“And did I hear correctly that you two met in high school and decided to go to the same college? That’s putting a lot of pressure on a young relationship, don’t you think?”

“Well, we’re from the area and we both still live at home, so.” She shrugged one shoulder, a gesture that reminded me of someone but I couldn’t place it. The differences between her experiences and my own were fascinating to me. I couldn’t imagine choosing to live at home, let alone doing so happily.

“That’s remarkably forward thinking for someone your age,” I said.

“Thanks?”

“Have you spoken about what you’ll do after you graduate? You’re not an English major, correct?” Julian always took on a tone of avuncular concern whenever we considered choices he deemed unwise, and I hoped that came across. She and Luis really didn’t know what they were doing, and they were undoubtedly in for a rude awakening one of these days.

“I’m prelaw, but also we’re only sophomores?”

“Never too early to start thinking about what’s coming next, if you want my advice.” I smiled and leaned back in my chair. 

“Okay. Um, about this paper? I was wondering if you could tell me if this argument makes sense? I decided to talk about Prospero’s speech.”

After that it was simple to answer her question in a confident, almost diffident manner. I did sometimes wonder what kind of impression I made on my students. They were all so much less forthcoming than we had been with Julian. We spoke to him candidly and enthusiastically about our scholarship and our personal feelings towards it. But I knew I didn’t have his open, childlike curiosity, that I didn’t have the kind of naturally warmth that encourages such intimacy. I was too much like Henry, without Henry’s control and insight. It frustrated me, and I spent probably too much time finessing my personal presentation while I was on campus. I’d finally mastered a convincingly neutral accent and obscured my own Californian origins as best I could, letting people believe I came from money in the East. The lying was no trouble, and my friendship with Francis gave it extra conviction.

Liz caught me crossing the quad the next day, on my way to my car. I still drove Henry’s BMW, half a sentimental affectation, half because I could hardly afford something so nice on my own. It was holding up in California’s climate quite nicely--better than it would have out East, I’m sure.

“Richard, darling, do you have a second?”

I paused and let her hold on to my arm with his small hand like a pincer just above my elbow. I’ve always hated when women do that.

“How can I help you, Liz?”

“Well,” she said, looking up at me with wide eyes lined in bright blue pencil, “I just wanted to schedule your review. Is now a good time?”

“No, actually, I’m on my way to an appointment.” I was on my way to nothing of the sort, but there was no way I was telling her that. “I thought my review wasn’t until the end of the semester? Is there a problem?”

She pursed her lips. “No, no, of course not. It’s just that you’re so far away from the rest of the department--we hardly see you! And I don’t know if you’re aware, but there are some rumors going around…”

“As you said, I’m rather out of the loop. What kind of rumors?”

“Nothing serious!” She laughed and lightly smacked my arm. “You know how schools are--the more ridiculous the better. Last I heard you were an undercover CIA agent, recovering from being shot here in LA. Oh, and you’re not really from Vermont, but I forget where you’re supposed to be from instead.”

I smiled. “You’re right, that’s completely ridiculous. I’d be happy to sit down with you tomorrow, say after my three o’clock class?”

“Perfect!” She brushed a kiss against my cheek and released me.

I knew that the rumors were just a coincidence, that they were the standard kinds of things people said when they didn’t know what else to think, but I felt a brush of the old paranoia all the same. Every time I think I’ve laid that particular boogeyman to rest it comes creeping back. I’m an old hand at dealing with it now, and I still had a stash of pills from the last episode, a few years ago.

I went straight home and dug them out from the medicine cabinet, then stretched out on the couch with a glass of bourbon to wash them down. I put on a record Francis had sent me--the Prague Philharmonic rendition of the Lawrence of Arabia soundtrack, which was really quite good--and prepared myself to slip into unconsciousness.

First I was subjected to the regular screening: shower of gravel, wind-milling arms, a hand that claws at a branch and misses. A barrage of frightened crows explodes from the underbrush, cawing and dark against the sky. As if from a distance I could feel myself shake and break out into a cold sweat but this was to be expected and was all part of the process. I just had to get it out of my system, like a shingles flare-up. Once it was through I would hardly think about it for the next few years.

###

By the time my afternoon class started the morning clouds had dissipated and I was feeling almost energetic, which was unexpected as I still wasn’t sleeping well. I drummed my fingers on the tabletop, waiting for my students to take their seats.

“I was thinking we should have a end of term party,” I said, surprising even myself. Sometimes my habit of lying makes the most absurd things come out of my mouth. “You’ve all done such great work this semester--” Really they hadn’t. “--and it could have a Feast of Fools theme, meaning that one of you would be in charge and I’d be just another student for the night. How does that sound?”

They exchanged uncertain glances while I pretended not to notice. My smile was feeling forced, though, by the time Oliver flicked back his bangs and said, “Yeah sure, that sounds fun. Would it be here? Like on the last day of class?”

“No, at my house in the hills.” I had no such house in the hills, but Sophie did. I hadn’t asked her about using it, of course, but she traveled a lot and had let me crash there before when I needed a break. As I spoke the party began to sound like more and more of a good idea and I found myself warming to my topic. “I’ll have wine and food, just wear your most medieval jester outfits. It’ll be fun.”

Josh raised his eyebrows at Luis. “How do we decide which of us gets to be in charge?”

“We’ll draw names out of a hat. In fact, let’s do that right now.”

I got up and took Luis’s hat from down the table, then hastily scrawled names on scraps of paper. When I was done, I presented the hat to Brittany who delicately picked one of the screwed up balls of paper.

“Josh, it’s you,” she said. He threw up his hands and cheered.

“Hell yeah! I’m gonna be the best master you’ve ever seen! What do I get to do?”

I smiled. “Anything you want.”

I let them joke and talk among themselves for another minute. The sleeping pills I’d been taking made me feel a little woozy occasionally--I’d lost the knack of dosing myself since Hampden--but it soon passed.

“All right, let’s talk about Titus Andronicus for a little bit, at least. What did everyone think?”

Brittany and Oliver made faces. “I didn’t like it,” he said. “It was so upsetting,” she said.

“It is Shakespeare’s bloodiest play, and a lot of the plot comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Why might they be related?”

“The Romans were totally into gore,” said Josh. “Like that Seneca dude? I read some of his plays for a class last year and some of them were so violent they couldn’t even be performed.”

“But what does that have to do with the longevity of their work? If they’re so upsetting, why do we still care about them?”

“People love gore,” said Luis. “So many people watch scary movies all the time.”

“Perhaps the question is, why do we love horror so much?”

“I think people like to see it acted out so they don’t have to do it themselves,” said Brittany thoughtfully. “It’s like a release.”

“It’s cathartic, yes,” I said. My head felt like it was wrapped in cotton wool. I pushed myself straighter in my chair to disguise how bad it was getting. “We… think about these things all the time, all of us, obsessively, but we don’t really want to do them, so we watch other people do them instead, as if they were real.”

“Lazy,” said Henry. His eyes bore into me in the mirror. “Is this a therapy session or a classroom? Tell them about what it’s like to be unable to speak about the horrible things that have happened to you, why don’t you.”

“Shut up!” I snapped. God, my head was really aching and the light was doing funny things in the corners of my vision.

“...Professor?” asked Brittany. “Are you okay?”

I looked up and saw four familiar faces looking at me in concern and one in contempt, then I blinked and they were my students once again. 

“Excuse me,” I said. “Migraine. We’ll continue this discussion next time.”

I lurched out of the room and barely made it into my office before throwing up. After carefully sipping water for the next hour or two I felt better and resolved to be more careful with my sleeping pills going forward. But more than that I was angry with Henry. How dare he disrupt my class like that? He knew how concerned I was about my position at the school. What if one of the students complained about my erratic behavior? I wasn’t like Francis or Charles, I couldn’t afford to be a wreck whenever I felt a little anxious about what we’d done. As much as I hated him, I had to be more like Henry: calm, calculating, and ready to do whatever necessary.

Since I halved my sleeping pills I barely slept that night and was forced to watch Bunny’s fall over and over but I felt better in the morning, less manic. I had no desire to drive into campus, but I forced myself to go in for office hours. The worst thing I could do was not show up and prove that I was unstable after yesterday’s outburst.

Josh showed up, paper in hand. I was surprised to see him--he hadn’t bothered to stop by the rest of the semester, although he sorely needed the extra help. He was not a natural scholar, and I wondered why he was getting his degree at all. Family pressure, perhaps.

“Hey professor, got a minute?” he asked, looming in the doorway. He was really quite tall.

“Sit down, please. What can I help you with? Metahemeralism got you again?”

“Um, no. I was just wondering if like you thought, for the final paper, if it would be worthwhile to discuss how all the mythical references are one of the reasons people think that Shakespeare was really someone else? Because they think he wouldn’t have been that educated?”

“Bunny, I’m impressed,” I said. “I was sure you were going to ask me if Shakespeare knew John Donne.”

He looked bewildered. “No? Should I?”

I laughed. “I should hope not! But to answer your question, I think that’s an interesting idea, although I advise you not to let it take over your whole paper.”

“Okay, thanks.” He got up to go. “Oh, professor? Is that party you were talking about still on?”

“Of course, why wouldn’t it be?”

“I dunno, I just thought maybe with your migraines you might not want to do it after all?”

I laughed and got the door for him. I didn’t know why I’d been so worried about my students not liking me. “Don’t worry, Bunny, you’ll get your chance to play the master. I’ve got some fun things planned for you all.”

The truth was that I had nothing planned, at all, and with my head the way it was organizing the party was going to be difficult. But I didn’t regret my spontaneous offer and channeling Henry (who I was still studiously ignoring, despite the way he was dogging my every footstep) to the best of my ability, I got everything ready over the next two weeks. Sophie was more than willing to lend her house, and I went shopping and dropped everything off there in advance.

The evening of the party I watched the sun set over the hills with a glass of bourbon on Sophie’s patio. In the end I couldn’t bear to put on motley, so I was dressed in my favorite suit. Sophie had an extensive CD collection and so even though I despised it I put on some pop music that reverberated through the open floor plan. 

The house was very modern--all concrete and glass, not my style at all--and the setting could hardly have been more Californian if it tried, but the rugged, sparsely vegetated hills reminded me of Greece. Both places had the same mediterranean climate, after all. I’d gone to Greece, once, by myself. I’m not sure what I was looking for, exactly, but I remember thinking that it seemed hollow. It was only later that I realized I’d been expecting to find everyone--Julian, Henry, Bunny, Francis, Charles and Camilla--striding about the hills and ruins.

Luckily Josh and Oliver pulled up before I could get too caught up thinking about that. They had both made modest efforts to dress according to the theme--Oliver more successfully, with his hair dyed pink and green--and I ushered them into the den.

“Let me get you some wine,” I said.

“I’m driving,” said Josh, apologetically.

“Nonsense,” I said, “it’s a party! Just drink slowly and you’ll be fine.”

Brittany and Luis showed up shortly after and I made Josh greet them in his role as master and offer them refreshments. He did his duties with the kind of gallant flair that I remembered so well. Soon everyone was sitting comfortably chatting about their upcoming exams and Christmas plans. It was exactly as I might have wished and it was with not a little regret that I stood up and announced the next phase of the evening.

“We’re going to what?” said Oliver.

“Hunt Josh,” I said, smiling.

“Outside?” asked Brittany. “Why can’t we do it inside?”

“Come on,” I said, “where’s your commitment to the cause? This is a Feast of Fools!”

“Did they really do this?”

“What about mountain lions?”

“And coyotes?”

“Guys, you’ll be fine. Where’s the glory without a little risk?”

Josh rubbed his hands together, warming to the idea. “I bet you’re worried you won’t be able to catch me,” he said to Luis.

Predictably, Luis reacted to that and I knew I’d won. I felt a little lightheaded and exchanged my bourbon for water. We needed to be drunk, but not falling down. My mouth was watering and I knew that this, more than turning in the last of my grades, was the culmination of my semester. In some ways I’d been building towards this party for years without knowing it.

We trooped out on the patio and turned our backs for a minute while we gave Josh a head start. He whooped loudly, once, then disappeared. I’d given him a flashlight, but the rest of us were without. They’d complained about the handicap but quickly realized it was an advantage. Our night vision was unimpeded and we could follow the jerky, zig-zagging motions of Josh with ease.

The scrub brush pricked at my legs but I soon stopped feeling it. My heart was beating hard in my chest and I found myself engaging in what I can only call ululating war cries with first Luis then Brittany and Oliver. There was a fifth person with us and then we were a real pack. We were hunting dogs out on the savannah, chasing down our next meal. We were hungry and excited.

Josh led us down the ravine. At first he’d try to hide but we always found him out and eventually he gave up and just ran. He was fast, but he was scared and we wanted it more. When we found him he’d gotten trapped in a gully that ran up against the cliff face. Oliver charged forward and pushed him against the rock.

“Oof,” Josh said. He was panting and covered in dirt and scratches from where he’d fallen. “All right, you guys got me. Man, those sounds you were making were messed up. That shit was freaky.”

Brittany growled and joined Oliver holding Josh by the arm. He was taller than me, but I wrapped an arm around his neck and pulled him down.

“Hey! What the fuck!”

Luis sat on his legs and hold him still and I tore open his sweatshirt which ripped like tissue paper. Oliver leaned forward and bit at his chest and I followed suit. Copper bloomed on my tongue and I paused to moan. This, this was what it was all about. Omophagas was here at last.

Someone was shoving me off him. They wanted to fight me for the kill. I snarled and opened my eyes to see Luis, wide-eyed, crowding me back.

“What the fuck are you doing, man?” he screamed.

“Holy shit, Josh, are you okay?” Oliver was saying.

I struggled but Luis was strong and Brittany came to help him. They got me on my stomach and held my hands behind my back. I screamed in frustration but they were relentless.

“You don’t understand!” I cried. “We can’t give up now, we have to complete the rites. Please, you’ll see, just let me finish crossing over. I have to do this, I have to join them!”

“What the fuck just happened,” Josh asked. I heard him push himself into a sitting position.

“I have no idea, he just went nuts.”

“I’m calling the police.”


End file.
